And then, quite clearly in her mind, she heard the voice of old Mr. Shang, the Shining Crane: I saw the necklace upon her throat... I knew it for what it was.
In the firelight, still circling Christine’s neck, the opals had exactly the red gleam of the eyes of rats, the gleam of Blake’s eye as he sprang toward them, the tire iron that had killed him upraised in his hand. The shadow in the center jewel was definitely moving; it wasn’t just the wild light of the flames. Alec shoved them toward the higher ground, where part of a half-constructed house stood, but with a sudden wrench Norah pulled her arm free of his grip. She tore at Christine’s throat, breaking loose the catch on the Moon of Rats and pulling free the ancient chains of pearl and opal and bronze. Alec yelled “NORAH!” in a voice she had never heard from him, but she dared not stop, dared not think about what she was doing. Holding the jewels high in her hand, she raced back to the burning car, toward the stooped, scuttling shape that ran toward them, its face twisted into nothing human. Flame was everywhere around her, framing the thing as it hesitated and turned toward her; the heat seared her face and bare arms, unbearable after the icy wind of the night.
She stopped within ten feet of Fallon—within ten feet of the burning wreck of the car, as close as she could get to the inferno—and flung the tangle of jewels and chains into the heart of the blaze.
Above the roar of the flames she heard Fallon scream. He—it—threw itself at her, past her, into the fire, but she was no longer looking. Rocks heated by the burning weeds and scrap lumber all around cut and scorched her feet as she clutched her skirts and ran as she had never run before, back to where Alec and Christine—The idiots! she thought frantically—waited for her by a half-constructed bungalow. It was only when she reached them that she dared to glance back and saw that Blake no longer pursued them.
From the shadows of the house frame and half-fallen roof where she clung grasping Alec’s shoulder, she saw the dark figure silhouetted against the fire, tearing and digging at the burning wreck.
Orange-yellow glare exploded off to their left. The derrick nearest the car was sheeted in a cone of flame. Suffocating heat poured into her lungs, beat on her like a physical force, so that she could barely draw breath. For the first time she felt pain in her feet. Somewhere sirens wailed.
Alec pulled them into the aborted ruin of the bungalow and out the back, collecting a yardlong chunk of two-by-four for himself and another for her. Christine, stumbling between them in her bloody gown, was barely on her feet.
“That’ll be the Gilmore Oil boys,” he said, leading the way through a dark jumble of dead trees and ankle-deep rustling leaves. Now and then Norah would bark her shins painfully on something iron and ash-smelly, as if the grove were scattered with rusty little stoves. Above the smoke the night smelled thickly of rotting oranges. “LA County wouldn’t get their engines out here this fast.”
His voice sounded quite normal. Norah wondered how on earth he could manage that until she heard herself say, “He’s trying to get the necklace.” The black figure could still be seen moving around the burning car, prying off pieces of flaming iron.
There was a long, long silence.
Then Alec breathed. “Jesus.”
“He made the ground catch fire,” whispered Christine. “Can he... can he follow us? Can he just burn us up where we sit?” She sank down onto a stump, shaking all over, her voice barely more than a rattle. Norah realized that here, away from the flames, it was surprisingly cold, and she was racked with wave after wave of uncontrollable trembling. Alec stripped off his suit jacket and put it around Christine’s shoulders, then cast a helpless look at Norah. Fumblingly, she pulled the wings of her dress forward around her own bare arms. Wounds from the shrapnel left trails of blood through the coating of filth. Somewhere in the back of her mind she thought, There goes three hundred dollars of Christine’s money...
“I don’t think so,” Alec answered Christine’s question after a time. “He may not be able to track us without the necklace. I think what he did was... was explode the underground methane or maybe the oil beneath the surface of the ground. Jesus,” he whispered again. He, too, had begun to shake.
“You killed him,” Christine said slowly. “Norah—Alec—I gouged his eye out. I knew he was going to kill me, I jammed my thumb in his eye, and it just... just...” She shook her head and bowed over suddenly, retching, holding her black and gummy hands to her mouth. After a moment she spoke again, her voice a broken wheeze, and Norah reflected that it must hurt her to speak at all. “He just kept... kept coming. Like he didn’t even feel it.” She pulled the tux jacket closer around her shoulders and hunched over again. She could not stop trembling.
“No,” Alec said softly. By the glare of the distant flames Norah could see how the sweat glittered in his beard. Soot and blood made a long, charred-looking V down the front of his marble-white shirt. His hand was unsteady as he pushed up his glasses, watching the first of the fire trucks arriving, the men swarming around the column of fire that spouted from the burning well. Overhead the resplendent full moon seemed to watch, indifferent in its halo of ice.
Nobody went near the flaming wreck of the car. There was no sign of Blake Fallon.
“Poor Blake,” whispered Christine after a time.
“Yes,” Norah said softly, hearing a broken voice whisper, The rat... I saw its eyes reflected in the mirror above the bar... “Poor Blake.”
Her mind went back to the giggling girls in the Cafe Montmartre, the drugged glitter of Fallon’s eyes and his roars of silly laughter as he dumped his drink over the waiter’s head.
It must have got him that night, she thought quite clearly, as if she were reading a title card in a film. The way it got Charlie, drunk out of his mind on bootleg champagne...
Christine looked up and pushed the thick hedgerow of her hair from her eyes. She had lost her jeweled bandeau with its peacock feathers, and under Alec’s jacket her white throat was a mass of cuts where Blake’s hands had driven the bronze links into the flesh. In her broken voice she whispered, “What happens now?”
“Now?” Norah looked out at the confusion of men and fire trucks in the red glare around the oil well. She took a deep breath. “Now we take the streetcar back to Hollywood and phone Mr. Brown to tell him that Blake Fallon went mad and tried to murder you—and may very well have murdered that poor boy you left the party with.”
“Monty!” Christine pressed her bloodied hands to her mouth again. “Oh, poor Monty!”
“If they haven’t found him by this time, they will when we call,” Norah said firmly. “I’m sure Mr. Brown and Mr. Fishbein between them will figure out what to tell the police. Tonight we all get a good night’s rest—preferably all in the same room—and tomorrow,” she concluded, “I think we had best go to Chinatown and see if we can find Mr. Shang.”
SEVENTEEN
THUNDER OVER FIRE
Auspicious time to meet the senior partner—
you will be upheld...
Omen of good to meet the hidden master...
CHINATOWN. ALEC HAD said it was the LAPD’s word for any situation unknown and incomprehensible and better left that way.
“I am looking for the Shining Crane,” Norah said, for perhaps the dozenth time, to the shopkeeper who came forward from the dark labyrinth of cheap bowls, brightly painted vases, racks of strange clothing, and bolts of fabric to which clung the unmistakable musty odor of silk. “I wish to ask him about a way to kill rats.”
The little woman bowed. Never in her gawky and long-legged life had Norah felt so inordinately tall as she had that morning. “Ah, so sorry,” she said. “I know not this name. But good poison here, killee rats all same.” She produced a red cardboard box labeled MARTINSON’S PATENTED RAT-BAIT and decorated with a dramatic drawing of a very dead rodent lying on its back with its tongue lolling.
“I’m sorry.” Norah inclined her head. “But it is the Shining Crane I am looking for. Thank you all the same.”
/> The woman bowed and smiled again, that all-purpose, close-lipped Oriental smile that so completely concealed whatever might be going on behind it. “All same,” she replied. She teetered back behind the counter on tiny deformed feet. Most of the women Norah had seen in Chinatown that afternoon had had what Alec said were called “lily feet,” bound and crippled in childhood to increase a woman’s charms, and though under the sensible stockings and Cuban-heeled shoes her own feet smarted in their bandages, Norah felt ashamed of her complaints about the pain.
In the rutted dirt of the street outside, Christine was gazing around her with a kind of indignant surprise while Black Jasmine sniffed at the boxes of cheap cooking utensils, straw baskets, and cloth shoes lined up against the store’s adobe wall. “I must say, this doesn’t look a bit like ‘Chu Chin Chow.’”
Lines of laundry stretched overhead or aired from windowsills; men and women in faded black or blue cotton pajama suits filled the unpaved streets, though Norah very seldom caught the stench of unwashed humanity typical of, for instance, the London railway platforms where she had stood to meet Jim. At least half the men still wore queues. Everyone seemed busy, shopping or taking care of children who were themselves taking care of still smaller children, carrying bundles of laundry or trays of fish on shoulder yokes; even the young men conversing with shopkeepers under doorstep awnings about the contents of unreadable newspapers had a purposive air. From the upper stories of the buildings drifted strange smells, sweet or tart or steamy against the itch of dust in the nostrils, and strange music that twinged oddly in her memory, punctuated by the incessant rattle of mah-jongg tiles.
“I mean,” Christine went on plaintively, “aren’t there supposed to be willow trees and those round gates?”
Clothed in a very stylish suit of green wool crepe, her black hair more or less pinned up under a heron-feather hat, and a green and lavender scarf hiding the ghastly abrasions on her throat, Christine looked remarkably well. Norah reflected, not for the first time, that there was considerably more to her sister-in-law than met the eye: Emily Violet would have been prostrated if she had survived the night at all; Norah certainly couldn’t imagine that sweet-faced ingenue having the nerve to gouge out an attacker’s eye or the wits to roll at the same time Alec had kicked in order to break Fallon’s hold. Flindy McColl would already have fled the country or would be in a stupor of drugs and alcohol to “get over the shock.”
“Perhaps the people who came over from China never attended Broadway plays,” Norah theorized, and Christine sniffed.
“Well, they ought to. It’s about their country, after all.” Her voice was little more than a croak. “Did he tell you anything?”
“She. And no.”
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t know Shang.” Alec came back from a perusal of the announcements plastered all around the door of a nearby building. Short though he was, he stood taller than most of the crowd eddying on all sides.
“If we talk to enough people,” he went on, “word will get back to him. I left word with Ah Tom—Tom Gubbins—over at the F Sui One Company. He knows everybody in Chinatown. Right now I’d say food is in order.”
Shang’s grandson located them over lunch.
“Don’t ask what’s in it,” Alec advised Norah, scooping the characteristically Chinese concoction of unknown meat, unknown vegetables, and peanuts over the rice on her plate.
“Oh, no, darling, that would be fatal.” Christine delicately unwrapped a triangle of oiled paper and with expert chopsticks picked at the few bits of steamed chicken within. “That’s the first thing I learned.”
“Ah,” Norah said wisely. “More Chinatown.”
“Exactly.” Alec added a dollop of brown liquid from a delicately flowered porcelain pitcher on the table. “I’m told the Chinatown division of the Los Angeles police force is a world unto itself. They’re supposed to make about $400,000 a year off bribes. They don’t bother the owners of the gambling clubs and fan-tan houses, and the tongs settle any little problems they have among themselves. There was a Flash of tong murders a few years ago. Nobody knew why they started, nobody knew why they stopped, but the heads of the Bing Kong and the Hop Sing called on the Chinatown beat and told them the problem had resolved itself.”
He shrugged. “So the police dropped it. They didn’t know what was going on, but they knew it had to be about either prostitution—which is everywhere in Chinatown—or gambling. Most of the big gambling in Los Angeles is done in places like this.”
He gestured with his chopsticks at the small, low-raftered room on the second floor of a building on Marchessault Street that smacked more of half-ruined Spanish missions than of the Celestial Empire. An attempt had evidently been made to display Christmas spirit, for incongruous garlands festooned the black rafters among the paper lanterns and a framed magazine illustration of Ebenezer Scrooge and Marley’s ghost hung above the mantel of the tiled fireplace. “Don’t eat that,” he added hastily as Norah picked up a short, hard-shelled red-black pepper from the aromatic gumbo on her plate.
“What is it?”
“Kung pao death pepper—mysterious poisons of the East. The Chinese like their food even hotter than the Mexicans do. Mostly, in the rest of Los Angeles and Hollywood, you get Americanized Chinese. I’m told at the Forbidden Palace you can get chow mein noodles fried Chicago-style. This is Chinese from China.”
“Pick them all out, darling,” advised Christine, doing so with the chopstick adeptness of a native. “And if you get a seed in your teeth, whatever you do, don’t bite it.”
Under her rouge and powder she looked exhausted, eyelids smudgy with fatigue and shock, lines of strain still faintly visible in the hollowed cheeks. She had looked far worse that morning when she and Norah had made their appearance, early, at Frank Brown’s office at Colossus Studios to talk to the police. But that, Norah knew, had been deliberate. She’d seen Christine darkening the hollows of her cheeks and the sockets of her eyes with judiciously applied Colura even as she doctored away the lines of strain around her pale unrouged mouth. “I want to look frail, darling, not hagged,” she’d explained.
She hadn’t had to do anything to the vicious bruises on her neck. Pulling off the scarf to show the police detectives the white flesh blackened, the virulent red patterns where Blake’s grip had driven the necklace’s links into the skin, had been a stunning piece of theater and one calculated to divert anyone’s mind from any question about gouged eyes, smashed skulls, appropriated vehicles, or two of the Gilmore Oil Company’s wells still in flames. The smoke from them had been visible through Frank’s office window.
“He was insane,” Christine told Brown, drawing quietly on a cigarette before the police came, her dark eyes haunted-looking in their bruised rings. Norah, sitting on the blue velvet couch with Black Jasmine on the far side of the office, had to admire the underplaying. Christine had tried it on her, both hysterical and quiet, before leaving the house that morning. “I think he was going insane all the time at Red Bluff, when he was following me around like a demented wolf. Poor Monty had nothing to do with it.”
The young stuntman was in a coma at the Methodist Hospital. Christine had telephoned while putting her makeup on.
“Nothing I did—nothing Alec did—would stop him. God knows where he went or what he did after he wrecked Miss Bow’s car.” When Alec heard who the owner was of the car in which they’d made their escape, his sole comment had been, “No wonder the thing went like a bat out of hell.” They had agreed not to mention the fact that Fallon was already dead during the chase down Wilshire or talk about the explosions of subterranean gas. There were things, Norah said, that people would believe and things they would not. She was still having trouble believing them herself.
The early morning papers made no mention of anyone finding Blake Fallon’s body.
“Damn.” Brown rubbed his stubbled chins. In the outer office the typewriter clacked busily, and through the window Norah could see the comedians Larr
y and Jerry out in the studio quadrangle under the pepper trees, working out what appeared to be a new routine with the hot dogs they’d originally intended for their breakfast.
“Three-fourths of the hottest biblical in town in the can, and hands down the best acting I’ve ever seen out of Fallon...” The producer’s intolerant green eyes shifted to Norah. “This is hell, coming on top of the Pelletier murder and with Midnight Cavalier just out. Jesperson’s fighting me every step of the way on the Enterprise buyout.” He picked up his cigar from the silver ash-tray and drew thickly on it, but mercifully it had gone out. “You think Blake set those guncotton charges in the desert last week?”
“He certainly had access to the guncotton.” Norah looked back at him, while Black Jasmine chewed plaintively on her finger. “More access than the extra he accused of doing it.”
“Damn.” He glanced up as a secretary tapped discreetly on the door to announce the arrival of the police.
“We’ll keep this as quiet as we can until we find out what they know,” he said, his cold glance going from Christine to Norah as he stubbed the cigar in the tray. “And nothing to the press, you understand? None of this calling them up to tell them some senile idiot’s filled your dressing room with flowers, all right? Let’s fade back and see what they know. If Fallon went as crazy as you think, he may have turned up.”
“He may,” Norah said quietly. “But I sincerely doubt he’s turned up alive.”
“Miss Blackstone?”
Norah looked up in surprise, broken from her reverie. A young Chinese man stood next to the table, bowing respectfully. He wore what she thought of as traditional Chinese garb: the black cotton pajamas sold in any of a dozen stores she had been in that day. His hair hung down in a traditional queue, and he had traces of a thin mustache. She thought he might be the young man who had led Shang out of the lobby of the Million Dollar Theater but could not be sure.
Bride of the Rat God Page 23
